What drives paid ad performance most: creative volume and diversity, or concentrating on proven winners?

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

The main driver of Facebook ad success is very high-volume creative testing rather than the standard targeting best practices, which are table stakes.

Lookalike audiences and optimizing toward best customers are standard, whereas launching new ads every day surfaced unexpected winners; a cross-functional room of designer, channel expert and data person made that volume possible.

Scope: based on Acorns' consumer app experience

7:38 20Growth: When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu, Growth Advisor

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026 · hedged

A company running paid properly needs at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month.

Scope: 'probably'

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Harry Stebbings · Jan 18, 2023

Loops should be amplified inorganically: when a piece of content outperforms organically, you should pay to promote it everywhere else and A/B test around what worked

You can very quickly see which content works — e.g. above 50,000 views on a platform — and then spend to make it perform even better

42:45 20Growth: When To Make Your First Growth Hire? How To Structure the Hiring Process for Growth? Five Core Things the Best Growth Hires Do in the First Week? What to Expect New Growth Hires to Achieve in the First 30 and 90 Days with Hila Qu, Growth Advisor

Paul Erlanger · Jun 27, 2026

When a content format works, moving on to find the next thing is completely wrong — you should iterate on it until it works better and then replicate it at scale

Conversion depends on granular variables — font, colour, placement, which person is speaking — that you only find by iterating on the winning format

Scope: Paul says his own team is still building this muscle

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Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

Cutting discussion time does not cost creativity, because shipping many more iterations produces more creative output overall

If you spend three months talking about an ad you run two a year; if you talk for a week you run four and can iterate more — the inception phase is shorter but you get far more done

36:26 Shorter deliberation enables more iterations which produces more creative output

Cliff Weitzman · May 9, 2026

Consistency of on-camera personality across ads doesn't matter, because you're marketing to different demographics and each needs its own face and setting

Different demographics convert on different presenters and backgrounds, so you reskin the same ad into many ages, ethnicities and settings and let the tests decide

18:22 Demographic matched presenters over a consistent brand face

Cliff Weitzman · May 9, 2026

Performance marketing should be run as an evolutionary tournament — ads graduate to bigger budgets only by beating incumbents, duplicating the way TikTok and Instagram distribute organic video

Winners get more spend, losers get cut; it's the same escalating-audience mechanic as the social algorithms except you pay per view

21:45 Tournament escalation where ads earn their budget

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026 · hedged

Early-stage companies should spend roughly as much on creative as on ad spend itself

Meta's Andromeda update made creative the targeting mechanism, so campaign tinkering no longer works and creative strategy is the whole job

17:47 Creative is the targeting mechanism fund it like media

Matt Swulinski · Aug 15, 2026

What matters is the diversity of the whole creative portfolio, not any single winning creative; doubling down only on what works will crater performance and raise CAC

Assets have to look and feel different to the algorithm — different ages, genders, settings, hooks — because volume of identical content gets drowned out

21:33 Portfolio diversity beats doubling down on winners